I hack software.

The official release of Apache Hadoop 2.6.0 does not include the required binaries (e.g., winutils.exe) necessary to run hadoop. In order to use Hadoop on Windows, it must be compiled from source. This takes a bit of effort, so I’ve provided a pre-compiled, unofficial distribution below:

Self-explanation is one cognitive strategy through which developers comprehend error notifications. Self-explanation, when left solely to developers, can result in a significant loss of productivity because humans are imperfect and bounded in their cognitive abilities. We argue that modern IDEs offer limited visual affordances for aiding developers with self-explanation, because compilers do not reveal their reasoning about the causes of errors to the developer.

The contribution of our paper is a foundational set of visual annotations that aid developers in better comprehending error messages when compilers expose their internal reasoning. We demonstrate through a user study of 28 undergraduate Software Engineering students that our annotations align with the way in which developers self-explain error notifications. We show that these annotations allow developers to give significantly better self-explanations when compared against today’s dominant visualization paradigm, and that better self-explanations yield better mental models of notifications.

The results of our work suggest that the diagrammatic techniques developers use to explain problems can serve as an effective foundation for how IDEs should visually communicate to developers.

Error notifications, as presented by modern integrated development environments, are cryptic and confusing to developers. My dissertation research will demonstrate that modifying production compilers to expose detailed semantics about compilation errors is feasible, and that these semantics can be leveraged through diagrammatic representations using visual overlays on the source code to significantly improve compiler error notification comprehension.

I’m returning to Mountain View, California this summer to intern for Google, from June 16 to September 5. This time around, I will be working with the Knowledge: Translate team on interactive visualizations applied to the domain of machine learning.

Error notifications and their resolutions, as presented by modern IDEs, are still cryptic and confusing to developers. We propose an interaction-first approach to help developers more effectively comprehend and resolve compiler error notifications through a conceptual interaction framework. We propose novel taxonomies that can serve as controlled vocabularies for compiler notifications and their resolutions. We use preliminary taxonomies to demonstrate, through a prototype IDE, how the taxonomies make notifications and their resolutions more consistent and unified.